No Zazen on Weds 26 October

Hi all - just a quick note to say that we will not be meeting on Weds 26 October, as I'll be away on sesshin in Crosby. Normal service resumes the following week, so we'll be sitting as usual at the Friends Meeting House on Weds 3 November. 

Shariputra and the Thicket of Views

Statue of Shariputra from 
Mahamevnawa Amawatura
Monastery in Kandy, Sri Lanka

Just some reflections on a Saturday morning...

I was watching a video this morning about Shariputra - a fascinating video that explores what we know about the man himself, who he studied with before meeting the Buddha, his role in the Buddhist sangha, his enlightenment... and mostly has utter fascination with the Dharma that led him to be declared by the Buddha himself as the wisest among the Sangha. Indeed, in early Buddhist traditions, Shariputra is considered to have been the Buddha's chief disciple, senior even to Ananda and Mahakashyapa. If you're interested, it's part of Doug Smith's "Doug's Dharma" series of videos on early Buddhism, and can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcIdaTnraXM. 

This is all well and good from the perpective of early Buddhism, but it's interesting to note how Shariputra is positioned within Zen Buddhism, as there are some important differences. 

For a start, the 'transmission of the lamp', the blood-line lineage of the Buddha from teacher to student started with - according to Zen's foundational myth - the wordless recognition that passed between the Buddha and Mahakashyapa, in what we now know as the "flower sermon". Not Shariputra, the intellectual, the 'librarian' of the early Sangha. Doug Smith points out that Mahayana practitioners often miss that in the Prajna Paramita Hrdaya Sutra (yep, that one that we chant so often!), Shariputra is the object of the lesson being passed on, and not, in fact, set up as the wisest of the disciples as he most certainly would have been if the sutra came from an earlier period of Buddhist thinking. 

So is there, hidden in plain sight right in the first lines of the Heart Sutra, a nasty piece of sectarianism? And the answer is, in one sense, yes! Doug Smith points out how this works in the Mahayana tradition to paint Shariputra as a figure of the past, a figure of ossified tradition and meaningless intellectualism, compared to the Mahayana tradition's embodiment in the figure of the sutra's proponent, Avalokitshvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion. In short, encoded into the cast list of the Heart Sutra is the subtle message that, in the polemic terms of the day, Mahayana trumps Hinayana.*

If this sits uneasily with you, then... good. I think it should! At the same time, though, we need to resist the urge to leap to judgement, lest we end up committing the same ad hominem attack against the author(s) of the Heart Sutra as they are making against Shariputra. 

So, is there some more fruitful way of engaging with this? And of course, the answer must be: what does this say about my life and my practice? How can I get from this some insight into the conditions of my own existence?

For me, the promotion of Avaloketishvara and the relegation of Shariputra is a clear reminder to hold lightly to the "thicket of views" that seems to form the content of much of my conscious position about the world. What I think is right, what I think is just, what I think about this politician or that politician, about this or that social injustice. In the Aggi-Vacchagotta Sutta in the Majjhima Nikaya, the Buddha warns against getting caught in any one position, that this is:

...a thicket of views, a wilderness of views, a contortion of views, a writhing of views, a fetter of views. It is accompanied by suffering, distress, despair, & fever, and it does not lead to disenchantment, dispassion, cessation; to calm, direct knowledge, full Awakening, Unbinding. (https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.072.than.html)

So, I consider the mess of conficting opinions, half-formed prejudices, well-intentioned stupidities and poorly justified yet fiercely defended positions that seem to characterise the things that I believe... and in this light, it's easy to see how these so-strongly clung-to positions are a wilderness, a thicket, that cause suffering and division, rather than healing it. Even my most deeply-held beliefs, the ones that I know in my heart of hearts are good and true and beautiful, these too can be a cause of division and hurt, can be seen by others as an attack on their own, differing views. In the Aggi-Vacchagotta Sutta, the Buddha concludes by discussing how not to cling to views, and how this leads to nirvana. And I'll give it a go, but I think that simply "doing away with" positions, as the Buddha suggests, might be a bit beyond me right now! 

So what instead? And it is here that the example of the Bodhisattva of Compassion stands to provide a practical alternative. Avalokiteshvara, or as more commonly known to us in Japanese Zen, Kanzeon. Sometimes depicted with a thousand eyes and a thousand hands, and referred to as 'she who hears the cries of the world', Kanzeon is a figure we can aspire to that is attuned to the world, and informed by her great wisdom and compassion, is empowered to act within the world to reduce suffering. 

Senju-kannon; Tokyo National Museum
Muromachi period 14th century

Shigetsu's koan for his Shusso Ango this summer was #89 from the Blue Cliff Record, which refers to using those thousand hands and eyes "like someone in the middle of the night reaching behind her head for the pillow." This is a compassion that springs naturally from us, and much of what we have to actually do to manifest this compassion is to get out of the way of our original selves! The thicket of views that I get stuck in paralyses me, and I end up questioning ourselves endlessly, and never doing anything.

I've learned a lot about Shariputra today, from Doug Smith's video and the other reading it's led me to, and as ever I'm always grateful to learn these things. I'm just like that, I enjoy knowing stuff. I love my thicket of views! But as ever again, what will stay with me is not the fascinating historical detail, or learning about the Buddhist culture wars of the first centuries of the common era... it's how it has to come back again and again to my own life; how I choose to live it, seeing how sometimes I sabotage my own activity in the world, and being encouraged again to engage with what's in front of me here and now. 

Regular service is resumed...

Now that August is over, our regular weekly zen meditation sessions will resume every Wednesday evening, starting 7th September. We meet at the Quaker Meeting House in the centre of Northampton, please aim to get there around 7.15pm-ish for a 7.30pm start.

In the meantime, here's a pic I took one dawn during the final days of Shigetsu-san's Shusso Ango last week. It was a wonderful sesshin, followed by a great dharma combat ceremony in Liverpool. I do so love our sangha!

And here's an odd shot of myself (left) with this year's Shusso, Stephan Shigetsu, which he described as "crazy wisdom" but wouldn't say which was crazy and which was wisdom...!

(I think even a brief examination of my wild eyes means Shigetsu is def the 'wisdom' of this pair!)

SWZ Northants closed for August

Hi all - just a quick note to say that the SWZ Northampton group will not be meeting in August because of various holiday and sesshin trips. 

Our last meeting will be this coming Wednesday (27 July), and we'll meet again on the first Weds in September (7 Sept).

Hope you have a wonderful summer!

Practice is returning to the body (Quote)

So often, people mistake zazen for 'not thinking anything', and then get frustrated when they continually fail to somehow cease all mental activity, as if they could unplug their brains somehow.

Really, we find a way to truly experience each moment as it arises, including our responses to those moments. How easy, though, for our small selves get in the way, and we have a million different ways to avoid facing the truth of these responses... how can we see through these tricks we play on ourselves?

I love this advice from Joko Beck's Ordinary Wonder:

Practice is returning, always, back to the body. Feeling the original pain, anger, or whatever emotion it is that you’re trying to cover. Human beings want to cover everything, so we don’t feel it. We don’t want to go out of our way to feel something that’s unpleasant, do we? No. If you’re like me, you’ll find some way to cover it. But the longer we practice, the more quickly we see what we’re doing.

"A mother's love": A thought for Mother's Day

In South Africa, where my mother lives, today is Mother's Day - also in many other parts of the world, including New Zealand where my mother-in-law lives! How timely, then, that my inbox had this excerpt by Karen Maezen Miller from her amazing book Momma Zen: Walking the Crooked Path of Motherhood:

In fleeting moments of deep satisfaction and insight, I saw the absolute truth of life: the unbroken line of love that had led to my existence and would lead on through my daughter. My mother’s love, her mother’s love, her mother’s love, and back and back forever ago. Love that is no mere word, love that goes beyond feeling, love that is life itself. I was filled with a rush of respect for all mothers everywhere. This was how we all got here. What miracles, what sacrifice, what love!

Homage to the lineage of mothers! We are all of us the manifestation of their love and the love that tumbles down like snowmelt through each generation.

Happy Mother's Day, Ma! 💜

My mum and me - April 1, 2022

Spring (Poem by Sogi)

 That man's life is but a dream -
is what we now come to know.

Its house abandoned, 
the garden has become
     home to butterflies.

- Ii Sogi (1421–1502), trans. Steven Carter